Employing gamification methods to increase customer engagement in digital marketing

Abstract

As “Gamification” quickly becomes a hot topic across industries and academia, it deserves more thorough study through qualitative and quantitative research. There was a definite feeling of infancy of gamification, be it the definition of gamification or the effectiveness of gamification. This document provides a survey of this recent phenomenon of “gamification”: a concept that has been applauded as a “game changing layer” and derided as a “useless buzzword”. It provides a comparative review of different schools of thoughts on the effectiveness of applying game mechanics to non-game contexts. Both industry implementations and academic research is reviewed and analyzed. Most of gamification thought leaders agree that the current state of gamification is mainly focus on extrinsic rewards. While some see the bigger potentials of sustainable gamification with deeper researches in the intrinsic rewards from good game designs.